Vena hebraica nel giudeo-italiano. Dizionario dell’elemento ebraico negli Idiomi degli Ebrei d’Italia. Con la collaborazione di Claudia Rosenzweig
The Languages of Italian Jews – the long-lived Judeo-Romanesco, Judeo-Venetian and Judeo-Mantuan languages, with their loanwords from Yiddish; Judeo-Livornese, with roots in the Sephardic tradition of the Jews expelled from Spain; and other languages attested in Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, Lazio, Marche, Southern Italy (for the period up to the 15th century) – have preserved and passed on a rich linguistic capital that illuminates the history and society of each community. Writing of Judeo-Piedmontese in “Argon”, the first chapter of The Periodic Table, Primo Levi states: “its human interest is great, as are all languages on the frontier and in transition”. He describes its Hebrew component as a “Hebrew inlay” within the local dialects, “snatched from the far-off language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geological, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier”. This indeed is the nature of the Hebrew component presented in Vena Hebraica. This study is a dictionary of words and expressions that comprise the Hebrew and Aramaic component in the languages of Italian Jews. The compilation is the result of research conducted alongside studies on Jewish Languages in the Mediterranean, which were initiated by Shlomo Morag at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and continued by Aharon Maman.
Maria Luisa Mayer Modena initiated the teaching of Hebrew at the Università degli Studi di Milano where she held the chair in Hebrew and Comparative Semitic Languages, and in Hebrew Language and Literature –
Claudia Rosenzweig is Associate Professor of Old Yiddish Literature at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan). She has edited the chivalric poem, ‘Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher. A Yiddish Romance’ (2015).
